The present invention relates to the field of orthopedic surgery, and in particular, to disposable resection guides and methods of utilizing same for use during total joint replacement surgery.
Many surgical operations call for the accurate and precise cuts of bone or bone material. Typically, these cuts, or resections, are made using surgical saws or milling devices. These instruments, while excellent at actually performing such cuts, often times require the use of external guides in surgical procedures calling for accurate cuts. For example, a surgeon performing a total knee arthroplasty must make several cuts in the distal end of the femur to properly fit a prosthetic femoral component thereon. The position of such cuts ultimately determines the positioning and stability of the femoral component. Thus, if such resections are incorrectly made, the surgery can result in failure and require further corrective procedures.
For this and other reasons, surgeons often employ the use of surgical cutting guides, known also as cutting blocks. These blocks typically include guiding surfaces which aid in guiding the cutting device during the cutting of the bone material. These guiding surfaces may simply be flat surfaces, or in certain cases, open slots which allow a cutting instrument to be inserted and guided therethrough. One specific type of cutting block is a block utilized during a total knee arthroplasty having four guiding surfaces utilized to create four cuts on an already at least partially resected distal portion of the femur. These guides are typically mounted on a prepared distal femoral surface, and the four cuts are generally referred to as anterior and posterior cuts, and anterior and posterior chamfer cuts. Examples of these femoral cutting blocks are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,454,816 to Ashby, U.S. Pat. No. 6,258,095 to Lombardo et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,558,391 to Axelson, Jr. et al, and U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2005/0228393 to Williams et al., the respective disclosures of which are hereby incorporated by reference herein.
While cutting blocks such as those described above are useful in performing the various cuts on a bone, they have their drawbacks. Most importantly, the manufacturing costs associated with such blocks are often quite high. A standard block is typically constructed of a suitable metallic material machined from a solid block or from several solid pieces of a suitable metallic material assembled together to provide a block with one or more guiding surfaces which allow for the various cuts to be accurately and precisely performed. These materials and the manufacture and manipulation of same are generally costly. Often times, these relatively high manufacturing costs, require the expensive cutting blocks to be utilized in multiple surgeries. This re-use often requires the cleaning and sterilization of such a block prior to each use, which necessarily adds an additional per-use cost.
Further to the high manufacturing and per-use costs of utilizing such well known cutting blocks, multiple uses of a single block may cause the guiding surfaces or the like of such blocks to become less accurate and precise. More particularly, multiple uses of such devices may allow for the greater chance of misaligning a cutting tool, such as a flat oscillating saw blade, due to wear of the cutting guide surfaces. In addition, even the most widely utilized sterilization procedures may not totally prevent the spread of dangerous bacteria or the like, which may in turn cause life threatening infections or other illnesses. Hence, a cheap, single use cutting block would be advantageous for use in common orthopedic procedures.
Therefore, there exists a need for a single use cutting block that can be inexpensively manufactured, while maintaining the required precise and accurate guiding surfaces needed for making cuts.